Hors Satan Reviews
Boston Phoenix
God works in strange ways, especially when Bruno Dumont directs him. Or is that the devil?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Reeling Reviews
The ambiguity of the episodic story with its sparse dialog, combined with the visually stunning landscape photography, makes "Hors Satan" a compelling, if overly long, composition.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Reeling Reviews
"Hors Satan" could be grouped with Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" (itself based on Dreyer's "Ordet") and the films of Robert Bresson, but his minimalism makes his meaning more elusive, inviting less emotion than those filmmakers.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Film Journal International
Controversial yet meditative French drama makes inscrutability its raison d'etre.
Top CriticMaddening, pretentious, hypnotic and transcendent in roughly equal measure.
Hors Satan is stark, strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.
Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Ultimately less an arty provocation than a secular invocation, Outside Satan seems almost helplessly exploratory, an honest account of groping for grace.
Contactmusic.com
Provocative French filmmaker Dumont pushes boundaries even further with an astonishing approach to the Christian narrative (the title translates as Outside Satan), mixing the sacred and profane to shake up audiences and get us thinking.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Slant Magazine
Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Observer [UK]
[Dumont's] sixth film and perhaps his most compelling ...
This is London
The film develops a powerful hold on the watcher as it progresses. But beware, it takes you on the weirdest of metaphysical journeys.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Financial Times
To paraphrase Shakespeare, madness in gifted ones, or eccentricity at once errant and forthright, must not unwatched go.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Guardian [UK]
Bruno Dumont's film-making is just so fluent, unnerving, gripping; he is entirely unique.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Daily Telegraph
Dumont's picture, as frustrating as it is profound, elicits the unease which passeth all understanding.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
ViewLondon
Intriguingly directed and strikingly shot, this is a typically provocative drama from Bruno Dumont with superb performances from David Dewaele and Alexandra Lematre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Empire Magazine
Bleak and compelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The result is mesmerising, beatific, disturbing, and leaves us pondering our own beliefs in a way few films do.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Little White Lies
Not everyone will want to go back for more, but those who do will find rich rewards.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
